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1 Dionysian Pessimism “[N]ot even the boy whom his mother carries in the womb; let not even him escape, but let all perish together from Ilios, unmourned and unseen.” So spoke the warrior and . . . he counseled rightly. —Iliad Fourteen years after completing The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche “appended”1 his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” wherein, despite the defects of this “strange and almost inaccessible book” (BT SC 1), he still recognized the task to which he had “by no means . . . become a stranger” (BT SC 2). This task, though somehow always haunted by loneliness and smouldering violence, nevertheless breathed a little ecstasy at “that virtuous energy”2 he identified with the “most beautiful, most envied type of humanity to date, those most apt to seduce us to life, the Greeks” (BT SC 1). Nietzsche reaped much from the ancient Greeks, and his passion for them, far from being a dirge-like paean, is rather a seduction into “every labyrinth of the future.” It is easy to get lost here in the midst of such an undeniable “spirit of daring and experiment.” But no matter how quickly Nietzsche moves into dizzying vistas of the future, we must constantly recall that he always “looks back when relating what will come.”3 This “looking back,” this thinking backwards into the ancient world as a means to giving a name to our tomorrow, pervades Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed, the whole foreground of light and life that goes by the name of “Nietzsche’s philosophy” is etched on the horizon of his preoccupation with Greek antiquity. I approach this horizon through Nietzsche’s perception of ancient Greek tragedy and cosmology since they exhibit an attitude which, woven into the ethos he identified with the earliest warrior aristocracies, is central to interpreting the foremost features of his “revaluation of all values” (T Foreword).4 When Nietzsche looked at his contemporaries, he saw a “surfeit of [the] ill-constituted, sickly, weary and exhausted people of which Europe is beginning to stink today.” This perception of “the maggot man . . . swarming in the foreground”5 indicates an irascible disgust at the effects of Christian Dionysian Pessimism 9 ressentiment6 upon Europe. His well-known antagonism toward Christianity and its disastrous impact on the “tremendous remnants of what man once was” (B 52) led to his war against everything “modern.” That Nietzsche saw Christianity as a decisive step toward cultural nihilism is well-known, but the soil wherein this poisonous plant took root had already been prepared by a degenerate type of Greek philosophy.7 “In the great fatality of Christianity,” he says, “Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the ‘ideal’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the ‘Cross.’” In the face of this calamity, he tells us, “[m]y recreation, my preference , my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides.” And if we ask why? Because Thucydides is “the last manifestation of that strong, stern, hard matter-of-factness instinctive to the older Hellenes” (T X 2).8 Here we have one of Nietzsche’s many affirmations of that great divide he saw between the culture of the ancient Hellenes during “the best, the strongest , the most courageous period” (BT SC 1) and later “decadent Hellenism.”9 It seems strange to hear Socrates and Plato—the cornerstones of intellectual history—counted among the foremost promoters of cultural decay among the Greeks. But Nietzsche would have us understand this, and “if it seems otherwise to us that is because we have been brought up in their after-effect.”10 For him, it was the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and “the quarrelsome . . . loquacious hordes of the Socratic schools” (HH I 261)11 who stood opposed to everything “fundamentally Hellenic” (T X 3). A Traitor’s Distinction Nietzsche’s attack upon “the philistinism of the Socratic schools” (T X 3) determines so much of what is now standard “postmodern” fare. But when he first began to emphatically demarcate two epochs of Greek culture in The Birth of Tragedy, the response of his academic contemporaries was viscerally antagonistic. The philological community was appalled at his juxtaposition of Apollo and Dionysus as complementary, yet antagonistic, creative powers. They were equally offended at the portrait of Socrates, who, in destroying tragic art, represents for Nietzsche the degeneration of the “physical and spiritual energies” (BT 13) peculiar to the earlier and healthier Hellenic era. For both of...

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